Floating around in script form for over twenty years in Hollywood, the sci-fi thriller “Gemini Man” finally comes to the screen this year thanks to the help of filmmaker Ang Lee and actor Will Smith.
Part of the reason it has taken so long to be made is the nature of the story in which a late fortysomething assassin named Henry finds himself the target of a clone of himself, one in his early twenties – referred to as Junior in the script.
For all the time it was circulated, no one wanted to make it with two different actors – it had to be same person for it to work and the technology wasn’t available to pull it off until recently. Even so, what you see here isn’t something as simple as a de-aged Smith (ala Samuel L. Jackson in “Captain Marvel”). Instead, it’s even more ambitious with Smith telling io9:
“It’s not de-aging. The younger character is not me. That is a 100 per cent digital character. A completely recreated character. They didn’t take my image and just stretch some of the lines. It is a completely CGI character in the same way that the lions in The Lion King are CGI characters.”
While photorealistic CG characters in films aren’t new, they’ve generally been non-human characters because the tech for humans has always seemed almost, but not quite there yet – thus leaving viewers caught in the ‘uncanny valley’.
This was seen as recently as “Rogue One” where the recreations of Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia just weren’t “quite right”. To create not just an exact human, but to effectively make them the co-starring lead? That’s unheard of and VFX supervisor Bill Westenhofer said this week there has been good reason for that:
“This has been a goal of visual effects for a long time. The reason that it’s hard is that every single one of us are [face] experts and that’s evolved over millions of years. The face is how we look at someone and tell that they’re lying to you or that there’s an illness and the subtleties of what tells you that are subconscious. So, for us to go in and try to recreate that digitally is really hard and takes all the science, and the great performance as well, to really pull that off.”
Lee adds: “No matter how hard you imagine it is, it is still harder than you can imagine. The familiarity we have [with] a human face is the most of all things we recognize.” During filming, Smith shot the Henry role opposite actor Victor Hugo as Junior. Once that was done, Smith spent several weeks shooting Junior wearing a body suit and facial camera on a performance capture stage, with Hugo now standing in for Henry.
Footage and reference shots from “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” “Bad Boys” and “Independence Day” were used which gave the animators plenty of idea of what look they were going for. It also added the complication that audiences know exactly what the actor looked like in those movies and so they had to be very careful. So the digital Junior was created, right down to the skin pore level.
The film only boasts 900 visual effects shots in the film, but the difference is some of Lee’s shots are way longer than a normal film including one unbroken two and a half minute take. On top of that, everything had to be rendered at 4K at 120 frames per second and because there’s no motion blur, there’s “nowhere to hide” bad work by the FX team.
“Gemini Man” opens October 11th.
